PLENARY SESSIONS

Government of India is steadfast in making world class cities in India. In this direction, the government has taken a number of significant policy initiatives including the launch of a number of flagship projects such as the Smart Cities Mission, Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), and Housing for All (Urban) in 2015, besides guidelines for the Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana (HRIDAY) were issued by the Ministry of Urban Development in January 2015. There are other important initiatives such as Swachh Bharat Mission, Skill India Mission, and Make in India Mission, etc. Another crucial policy initiative was undertaken by government of India on 3 December 2015 -Accessible India Campaign or Sugamya Bharat Abhiyan – aimed at obtaining universal accessibility for persons with disabilities by creating barrier free environment. Embedding of state of the art technologies in the built environment, and use of big data makes these initiatives globally unique for the Indian cities. Government of India expects to enhance the quality of governance by building partnerships between the public and private sectors. The chief objective of the government is to make cities economically buoyant, socially and culturally inclusive, and environmentally sustainable.

In this plenary session of the conference, the paper presenters are expected to showcase the success stories in regard to these city policies including how these flagship projects could be made more effective.

This Session will focus on constraints planning practitioners are facing while performing their duties as prescribed under various planning statutes in developing and developed countries. In India land being the state subject and town and country planning being an important state function, presenters and delegates would share their experiences about plans being prepared by different stakeholders such as diverse interest groups eager to protect their own interests? The kind of planning environment all of us are involved in making plans for the cities and regions will also form part of discussions in this session. Further, we need to understand the nature of such plans as well as explicit and implicit linkages between such plans at various levels and how these plans shape our cities and regions. In today's context it is imperative to know who is making and implementing plans for demographically and economically fast growing cities and regions. How plans are being perceived by planners and other policy and decision making elites and other stake holders? Do we still perceive plans as statutory documents presenting definitive pathways for orderly development of cities and regions? Alternatively, do we hear voices of dissent and complexity where we perceive plans as human creations filled with uncertainties, incrementalism, and work in progress? This is not an exhaustive list of concerns about city and regional plans. Nonetheless, in this part of the session, we expect that paper presenters would be able to provide some, if not all, the answers to the concerns raised above.

Planning schools continually produce planning graduates expecting that they would become effective planners when employed on planning jobs. The critical question pertaining to what kind of planning knowledges should be produced by planning schools and research institutions is rarely asked and answered. One regular response to such a crucial question is to update the planning syllabus. As cities and regions change fast and become more complex in developing countries, it is appropriate that knowledges are collaboratively and collectively produced. Chief concern in this session is: what are other ways of producing planning knowledges that become more meaningful for tackling real life planning problems? Another aspect is that trained planners are equipped with planning knowledge by all knowing planning faculty where the primary source of knowledge is planning academy. But planning knowledges are also produced in planning practice where different stakeholders are constantly engaged in the production of planning knowledges. Sometimes planning knowledges emerging from planning practice appear in planning journals. It appears that there is no formal recognition in planning schools about the planning knowledges being produced by different stakeholders who are neither trained researchers nor planning faculty. Can we think of planning knowledges rather than the body of planning knowledge? Can we identify diverse producers of planning knowledges and the nature of planning knowledges that they produce? To what purposes such diverse planning knowledges are put? How we could ensure that planning knowledges produced by different stakeholders in planning practice get embedded in the syllabus of the planning schools? These and other similar concerns will be addressed in this session with the aim of enriching planning education and in turn planning profession.